Why the Contemporary Writer Cannot Escape the Presentist Dilemma

(At crossroads with presentist and eternalist approaches to writing fiction)

by Mandira Pattnaik

Killian Pham

This June, thousands of young men in Bihar, India, stuffed themselves in train compartments to travel for recruitment exams. Earlier this year, the same men voted the current political dispensation back to power in their state as an endorsement of their previous work in government. I wasn’t surprised to see the images. These reports emerge with routine regularity. To me, these are merely like milk gone bad because you hadn’t refrigerated it—an unavoidable consequence.

Would I reflect these circumstances in my writing? Regarding oneself as a chronicler is somewhat pompous. Yet, as the years pass, my writing has been increasingly reflective of the present, the world we live in, its people, its rules. As you can imagine, my stories have been rather sad as a result. My last two fiction publications had children caught in the crossfire in an active warzone and “honor killing” practiced in India at the center of the narratives. Climate, unemployment crisis, anarchy, totalitarianism, mass surveillance, declining literacy/standard of education, and poverty keep percolating into my fiction. If I do not address an issue in my writing that is troubling me in the present, the effort seems infructuous, even entirely worthless.

I do understand and recognize that there’s absolutely no compulsion for this supposed activism, and also that there’s much sadness in the world to keep writing/reading about more. But what will I do about “mimesis” then? Mimesis invaded an entire column earlier. In literary criticism, art, and philosophy, mimesis describes how art imitates or represents reality. The concept dates back to ancient Greece. It is quite understandable that there is an innate desire in humankind to “chronicle” in order to understand the world better. A chronicler, empowered with curiosity and empathy, strives to represent reality.

Exactly how it happens in my writing. By introducing and objectifying material concerns, my writing may raise awareness and prompt conversations. I habitually gravitate towards serious concerns that seem, at least to me, of utter importance in this present day. I end up highlighting and amplifying those in my work. Perhaps some will remain relevant, well beyond publication. Definitely challenging but also whether or not I succeed will remain forever uncertain; but to me, that representation brings catharsis.

My ponderings around this new realization to dabble only in the real and present has led me to discover the philosophical view that only the present moment exists, rendering the past and future strictly unreal. It is called philosophical presentism. The argument is that time's passage consists of things entering existence as they become present and falling out of existence as they become past. Thus, the past only exists because we have records in the present, say fossils or monuments or literature. By that order, the present, as in 2026, will only exist in the future if we have records chronicling this day, this moment, and that is where our writings, our books, will have any meaning. Similarly, future events will be real, but do not yet exist. Presentists therefore say that time is defined entirely by continuous ontological change—the now moving forward.

While presentism limits reality exclusively to the present, another view also has its followers and is known as the Eternalism theory or the Block Universe concept. Eternalism describes the universe as a static, four-dimensional “block” of spacetime where every moment is equally real.

I’m quickly reminded that there’s a vast space for the eternal. For example, science fiction, timeless light-hearted themes, romance, crime thrillers, humor and satire. Kazuo Ishiguro reveals in an interview: “I read a very good Canadian book called Long Shadows by Erna Paris. It was written in the early 2000s and documents her travels, looking at the various kinds of brewing or buried trouble. There was also Postwar by Tony Judt, and Peter Novich’s The Holocaust in American Life." This was part of the research before embarking on writing The Buried Giant. Thus, several nonfiction materials written about present reality formed the bedrock of a fiction novel, but Ishiguro “eternalized” the narrative.

In case of historical fiction, writers often depict the historical setting and characters in the historical context, as though readers are watching a historical period through the lens of a text, as though it were happening now. For example, that text would use the dialect of that period. We’ve numerous examples of such works, and I assume it was the more fashionable and common practice until very recently. Authors like Hilary Mantel in Wolf Hall, for instance. Mantel's work is celebrated for its lush historical detail, sharp dialogue, and decision to write in the immediate third-person perspective. This highly unusual experimental approach worked exceedingly well to “eternalize." She utilized a highly modernized, intimate narrative voice to strip away the archaic distance of the Tudor period, bringing historical figures into a relatable, presentist psychological space.

A close cousin of Mantel’s bold experimental approach in the contemporary flash fiction space would be "Ms. Pac-Man in the Maze" by Sarah Chin (June 2025). Ms. Pac-Man Maze Madness is a 2000 maze video game by Namco Hometek for PlayStation, and actually a remake of another game Ms. Pac-Man (1982). "Ms. Pac-Man in the Maze" might be read as a classic example of retro-presentism, where a 1980s pop-culture icon is reinterpreted through a modern lens of existentialism and female agency. Readers may notice the setting with VCR and TV as well as the mention of "Late Night with Conan O’Brien" (a chat show of the 1990s), and the use of present tense, making the past feel like happening in the present.

Presentism in literature is therefore a critical practice. It involves interpreting and creating works through the lens of modern-day values, ideologies, and contemporary contexts. For instance, internet rumor and false information. A classic example of this in a contemporary flash fiction would be "The Devil Alive in Jersey" by Catherine Buck (January 2025). The piece mimics the erratic, snapping nature of online rumor and gossip through its dialogue only structure, which in itself is a very presentist choice, representing how information travels through social media and digital threads. One more example, "Sad Library Things", by Eileen Frankel Tomarchio (October 2025). This wacky piece uses the modern setting of a library to explore contemporary loneliness, imbuing inanimate objects with the specific emotional vocabulary of 2025.

Writers make a deliberate and conscious decision whereby they anchor their narratives, themes, and character motivations in the present, and examine current incidents, issues and society. It goes without saying that there’s a certain type of activism involved. Although we recently had an alleged AI-aided story win a major international literary award, the fear of AI has already been represented in a piece published in 2014. It asked how AI is taking over human workplaces, how we are being normalized in the usage of AI, and how acceptance of the same is being demanded and anyone questioning is being mocked at, like they were anti-progress or something like that. "Sorry Dan, But It’s No Longer Necessary For a Human to Serve as CEO" by Erik Cofer takes the form of a corporate letter, and is a strong voice critiquing the dehumanization of the modern workplace.

Interesting to note here that contemporary flash fiction uses presentism to collapse the distance between the narrative and the reader's immediate reality, often by using modern structures or centering stories on current social anxieties. I love the clash between presentism and eternalist approaches to writing. Indian writer Amit Chaudhuri says in n+1 on "Why I Write Novels"...

…So when people say to me that my novels aren’t novels but are taken verbatim from life, they don’t mean, then (obviously), that my novels are too real and not fictional enough to be called “novels,” but that they don’t abide by the rules of realism, which proclaim that a sentence like “He got up and opened the door” must lead to a story. Yet, as I’ve admitted already, it’s precisely a sentence like “He got up and opened the door” that leads me again and again to the practice of writing fiction, rather than only essays or poems. What is it about such a sentence that I find enabling? And why, at once, do I find it so difficult to use? It’s a difficulty that separates me from “natural” writers and readers of novels, who read, and presumably write, such sentences without exertion.

Thus, my takeaway from this examination is to keep doing what I’m trying—a mimesis of society, a critic, but also a hope beacon. It is truly exciting to witness everything with an awareness of the present, even if most of the present seem a repeat of the past, is generally despondent, and needs rectification. The reason being that it is also how we may incrementally influence the future, through an infinitesimal course correction.

Finally, allow me to share a prompt list that readers who are interested to write fiction from a presentist approach may use:

1. Evaluate if any war does any good to anyone except…

2. Examine how the breakdown of greed happens

3. Check indoor plants to ascertain how much oxygen they are contributing to the environment

4. Analyze why exactly did Jeff Bezos say that human water consumption is limiting AI’s potential, and incorporate results in a story

5. Trace the quote “Homelessness isn’t just a housing crisis, it’s a mental health and addiction crisis” to the person who said it and relate to reality before fictionalizing the situation